It is my sad duty to report here that some of the core clojure
maintainers, and the clojure Google Group, are experiencing ...
difficulties. These difficulties appear to originate from human
foibles, rather than from technical problems.

Particularly, Rich Hickey (yes, that is apparently his name) appears
to have become censorious and dictatorial, unwilling to abide
disagreement, even polite and reasoned disagreement, and quite willing
to attempt to forcibly muzzle critics.

The following nonabusive post was attempted three times, at widely
separated intervals, in response to what I felt was an unwarranted
personal attack. No rational person can consider this to be spam,
abuse, or in any way off-charter, surely. Yet all three times it
failed to appear, even as other posts were made to the group, and even
to the particular thread at issue. All reasonable doubt that this is
censorship rather than a glitch has been removed.

> On Jun 17, 6:05 pm, Rich Hickey <richhic> wrote:
>> On Jun 17, 5:45 pm, Wrexsoul <d2387> wrote:
>> > Well *something* was certainly missing, or I would have found it. You
>> > can't reasonably claim I was lax in my search efforts in this
>> > instance.
>>
>> reduce/foldl is called some variant of either reduce or fold in the
>> majority of languages in which it appears:
>>
>> [..])
>>
>> Anyone who is going to make claims about it being one of the basics of
>> functional programming should know that.

> I guess the functional languages I've used previously happen to be in
> that minority that don't call it reduce, then.

>> reduce is also mentioned twice in the very short page on sequences:
>>
>> [..]

> Yes:

>> Construct a collection from a seq: zipmap into reduce set vec
>> into-array to-array-2d
>> Compute a boolean from a seq: not-empty some reduce seq?
>> every? not-every? not-any? empty?

> But I was not looking to construct a collection or a boolean so I
> looked elsewhere, eventually searching the whole api page for
> every occurrence of "seq". Strangely, it seems the
> documentation for "reduce" does not mention the concept of
> "seq" even once.

> This was not a failure of due diligence on my part. It was pure
> happenstance. So please spare me the personal criticisms.

>> The only thing that was missing was thoroughness

> I disagree.

>> and a willingness to ask, on your part.

> I think it is better if one helps herself, and possibly others,
> instead of bothering the forum with noob questions. Don't
> you agree?

I reiterate: no reasonable person should consider the above in any way
abusive, yet it is true beyond a reasonable doubt that I was forcibly
prevented from posting it there, in response to a false accusation of
lacking thoroughness. A personal attack was mooted publicly and public
right of reply denied to its target.

The only thing "wrong" with the above post, as far as I can tell, was
that it disagreed with Rich Hickey instead of bowing to his ever-so-
superior wisdom.

Whereas Rich, as group manager, technically has the right to behave in
this rather uncivilized fashion, it is also the case that I, and
others, have the right to note and report upon the facts of this case,
and more generally upon the behavior and nature of the clojure Google
Group. It is clear that a person posting there in a good faith effort
to be helpful and preferring self-help to whining and demanding hand-
holding can expect a rather chilly reception there based on the
evidence of some of the recent threads posted there. Much worse even
than that, if she shows any inclination towards treating others as
equals and expecting civilized treatment rather than rolling over and
meekly tolerating whatever abuse and derision is heaped her way, she
can expect her posts to mysteriously disappear. Rich apparently has a
very strong preference for having the last word, and is quite willing
to employ his unfair advantage as group manager to get it, instead of
carrying out the duties of that office fairly and impartially while
remaining above any fray of personal altercations that might arise.

I reiterate that this is within Rich's rights. As it is within our
rights to make public note of these facts, and also within our rights
to decide to shop around for our clojure-related discussion needs if
we decide we'd prefer to be treated differently.

If anyone knows of a place for discussing clojure (possibly here; it
is a Lisp after all) that provides a better reception for people who
are uninterested in personal power politics and would rather just get
to the business of coding and, earnestly and in good faith, sharing
their knowledge and useful code snippets with others, then by all
means, please do point the way. Thank you. (An unmoderated Usenet
newsgroup would be best; there, any attempts at censorship would
require spoofing cancels, an action contrary to most NSPs' terms of
service. Censorship there would consequently be more susceptible to
effective reprisals.)

Likewise, if this discussion would be better conducted elsewhere than
c.l.l., crosspost and set followups as appropriate, though since
clojure is a Lisp, and since the clojure Google Group is obviously not
an option, I don't feel this post is especially mistargeted.

A second censored post, as innocuous as the first and not even
directly challenging Rich, follows:

> On Jun 17, 6:34 pm, Max Suica <MaxSu> wrote:
>
> And that is precisely what I've been doing. It's just that when I
> implement something and then post it here, the results I mostly get
> are not very appreciative. I guess quite a few people here don't feel
> as we apparently do.

The Google Group at issue is located here: [url down]

Generic flames of Google-Groups-in-general will not be constructive
responses, so please send those to /dev/null.

Thank you for your time and attention.

On Jun 18, 4:20 pm, Wrexsoul <d2387> wrote:
> It is my sad duty to report here that some of the core clojure
> maintainers, and the clojure Google Group, are experiencing ...
> difficulties. These difficulties appear to originate from human
> foibles, rather than from technical problems.
>
> Particularly, Rich Hickey (yes, that is apparently his name) appears
> to have become censorious and dictatorial, unwilling to abide
> disagreement, even polite and reasoned disagreement, and quite willing
> to attempt to forcibly muzzle critics.
>
> The following nonabusive post was attempted three times, at widely
> separated intervals, in response to what I felt was an unwarranted
> personal attack. No rational person can consider this to be spam,
> abuse, or in any way off-charter, surely. Yet all three times it
> failed to appear, even as other posts were made to the group, and even
> to the particular thread at issue. All reasonable doubt that this is
> censorship rather than a glitch has been removed.
>

So, your post fails to post 3 times, and you decide that Rich Hickey
is a crazy dictator? Ever hear of a network outage? I have had posts
get lost and show up on Usenet days later.

>>
>>

You didn't even look at the page on sequences when looking for
functions that operate on sequences.
....

>
> I reiterate: no reasonable person should consider the above in any way
> abusive, yet it is true beyond a reasonable doubt that I was forcibly
> prevented from posting it there, in response to a false accusation of
> lacking thoroughness. A personal attack was mooted publicly and public
> right of reply denied to its target.
>

I don't see how telling you that you lacked thoroughness is worthy of
such a long post. You did, it appears, lack thoroughness.

> The only thing "wrong" with the above post, as far as I can tell, was
> that it disagreed with Rich Hickey instead of bowing to his ever-so-
> superior wisdom.
>

Your thoroughness is not a topic for discussion on the clojure google
group.
Seems reasonable enough to me.

[..]
> newsgroup would be best; there, any attempts at censorship would
> require spoofing cancels, an action contrary to most NSPs' terms of
> service. Censorship there would consequently be more susceptible to
> effective reprisals.)
>
> Likewise, if this discussion would be better conducted elsewhere than
> c.l.l., crosspost and set followups as appropriate, though since
> clojure is a Lisp, and since the clojure Google Group is obviously not
> an option, I don't feel this post is especially mistargeted.
>

No, you can be as much of an idiot as you want on c.l.l., no
moderators here.

> A second censored post, as innocuous as the first and not even
> directly challenging Rich, follows:
>>
>>
>
> The Google Group at issue is located here:[..]
>
> Generic flames of Google-Groups-in-general will not be constructive
> responses, so please send those to /dev/null.
>
> Thank you for your time and attention.

Good luck with your personal crusade against Rich Hickey!

I hope it goes really poorly so he can write a lot of code.

On Jun 18, 5:25 pm, ACL <anonymousclis> wrote:
> So, your post fails to post 3 times, and you decide that Rich Hickey
> is a crazy dictator? Ever hear of a network outage? I have had posts
> get lost and show up on Usenet days later.

It wasn't a Usenet post. It was a Google Groups post, which Google's
server explicitly said was "successful", and traffic in the group was
otherwise normal for that period.

If you post to a webboard (not usenet) and your posts, and ONLY your
posts, fail to show up, you don't suspect an outage. Particularly not
if you retry after six hours, then again after another twelve, with
consistent results.

>
> You didn't even look at the page on sequences when looking for
> functions that operate on sequences.

Did you read my post? (I have kept the relevant parts quoted above.)

I said I did look at that page, but skipped parts that didn't seem
relevant. And then I did an even MORE diligent search: one of the
entire documentation for everything that operated on sequences. That
took about half an hour. That's clearly at least as thorough as the
maximum reasonable amount of thoroughness to expect from someone
before concluding that functionality is absent.

> > I reiterate: no reasonable person should consider the above in any way
> > abusive, yet it is true beyond a reasonable doubt that I was forcibly
> > prevented from posting it there, in response to a false accusation of
> > lacking thoroughness. A personal attack was mooted publicly and public
> > right of reply denied to its target.
>
> I don't see how telling you that you lacked thoroughness is worthy of
> such a long post. You did, it appears, lack thoroughness.

I did not.

> > The only thing "wrong" with the above post, as far as I can tell, was
> > that it disagreed with Rich Hickey instead of bowing to his ever-so-
> > superior wisdom.
>
> Your thoroughness is not a topic for discussion on the clojure google
> group.

If that is so, then it still indicates poor behavior on Rich's part:
he raised the topic and did not censor his own post. Two other people
posted blatant personal attacks, ruder than Rich's, for which he
rebuked them, but he did not censor their posts. I posted a calm
rebuttal on the same topic, far more civil than those other two and at
least as civil as Rich's, and he does censor it. That's quite the
double standard.

(I note that you are no longer claiming the post disappearances were
"network outages" and are now more or less admitting that they were in
fact acts of censorship.)

Furthermore, my post described aspects of the clojure docs. I think
that places it squarely on topic. My OTHER post was very clearly on
topic and non-abusive.

Face it -- my posts were not deleted for being off-topic. They were
deleted because Rich did not personally agree with the opinions
expressed in them. In other words, this was not order-keeping
censorship; it was political-speech-muzzling censorship, the worst
kind.

> Seems reasonable enough to me.

I disagree.

> > Likewise, if this discussion would be better conducted elsewhere than
> > c.l.l., crosspost and set followups as appropriate, though since
> > clojure is a Lisp, and since the clojure Google Group is obviously not
> > an option, I don't feel this post is especially mistargeted.
>
> No, you can be as much of an idiot as you want on c.l.l., no
> moderators here.

I have no interest in being an idiot. I do have an interest in
justice, and in warning the public about the chilly reception people
receive in a particular Google Group.

> > Thank you for your time and attention.
>
> Good luck with your personal crusade against Rich Hickey!

I have no such personal crusade. I posted merely to thwart, to the
extent possible, the censorship and to warn a potentially unsuspecting
public.

> I hope it goes really poorly so he can write a lot of code.

Perhaps you'd also be satisfied if he allocated that fraction of his
time, apparently considerably in excess of zero, currently budgeted
for slamming people unreasonably and for post-censoring to code-
writing instead?

I know I would.

Failing that, perhaps he cares to face me like a man and reply
directly to my latest "challenge to his authority", instead of sending
one of his flunkies to do the dirty work for him?

Or maybe he can *really* man up, and apologize for the whole affair.

It still astonishes me that what seems to have been an honest
misunderstanding has blown up into this, with successive escalations
by Rich and what's beginning to look like an actual honest-to-God goon
squad.

Escalations with mystifying lack of apparent motive.

To recap:

I post saying I didn't find X which I'd expected would be there,
detailing the steps of my thorough search, and I even helpfully
include actual (working, tested) code to implement X, plus example
code (also tested and working) using it.

Response: derision, name-calling, abuse.

I post honestly baffled at the responses I got, reiterating in even
more detail the search I had performed and politely pointing out that
the responses a) were personal attacks and b) were not appreciated. I
take care not to lose my cool, and to respond calmly and rationally.

Response: Rich rebukes the two goons that posted the most egregious
flames, and they apologize.

At this point, it looks like a simple ordinary misunderstanding of
some sort, resolved quickly by a mod putting his foot down in an
appropriate manner. Perhaps those two had had bad days, or simply were
themselves trolls (as one of them accused me of being).

But...

A short time later, Rich abruptly turns right around and flames me as
well, accusing me vaguely of acting in bad faith, without being very
specific as to the nature of the putative bad faith, aside from
supposedly not searching the documents hard enough.

Unbelieving, I reply, again calmly and rationally, to explain exactly
how thorough my search actually was and to note that I'd noticed a
general undercurrent of hostility there from the moment I'd arrived,
one for which there was no obvious explanation.

The result was basically just a reiteration of the same accusation of
lacking thoroughness.

I respond pointing out that the only possible more-thorough search I
could have performed would have been to *read* the *entire* api page
from top to bottom rather than grepping it. (It is 60 pages long, at
50 lines per page, and weighs in at approximately 200KB.)

He deletes the response.

Repeat a few times, and then here we are.

Point to one single action of mine in the above sequence that wasn't,
if anything, better than how you would have reacted had the same thing
happened to you.

Point to one single action of Rich's, other than rebuking the two
goons that one time, that seems reasonable under the circumstances.

Or better yet, don't bother replying and let Rich come here and
explain himself, maybe even apologize if he's man enough. I know he
watches this group. The appearance of one of his goon squad here to
flame me very quickly after my first post here strongly suggests it,
and I saw his name in the other recent clojure thread in cll, which
clinches it.

Wrexsoul wrote:
> Particularly, Rich Hickey (yes, that is apparently his name) appears
> to have become censorious and dictatorial, unwilling to abide
> disagreement, even polite and reasoned disagreement, and quite willing
> to attempt to forcibly muzzle critics.
>
.....
> The only thing "wrong" with the above post, as far as I can tell, was
> that it disagreed with Rich Hickey instead of bowing to his ever-so-
> superior wisdom.
>

> Rich apparently has a
> very strong preference for having the last word, and is quite willing
> to employ his unfair advantage as group manager to get it,


> If anyone knows of a place for discussing clojure (possibly here; it
> is a Lisp after all) that provides a better reception for people who
> are uninterested in personal power politics ...

I'm sorry, I thought you just implied you are uninterested in personal
politics. Oh, f*ck, you did. Well, thanks for raising the bar on
asinity, maybe I can sneak under now.

kt

Wrexsoul wrote:
> The following nonabusive post was attempted three times, at widely
> separated intervals...

I am on the Clojure list and received several repeated near-identical posts
from you, none of which were constructive. If you keep reposting the same
thing for no apparent reason then, of course, you can expect to be
silenced.

In this case, you asked a very basic question in a slightly inflammatory
way. While it would have been nice for the other members to be more
tolerant of you (although it is your duty to ensure that you do not require
tolerating), some chose not to be.

Frankly, I'd blame everyone involved including yourself. If you have other
such very simple and generic questions you may find it more productive to
ask them either in c.l.lisp or c.l.functional. People are generally much
more tolerant of abuse on usenet than on mailing lists.

Out of curiousity, in what functional language is fold called "accum"?

On Jun 18, 6:01 pm, Wrexsoul <d2387> wrote:
[..]
>
> Point to one single action of Rich's, other than rebuking the two
> goons that one time, that seems reasonable under the circumstances.
>
> Or better yet, don't bother replying and let Rich come here and
> explain himself, maybe even apologize if he's man enough. I know he
> watches this group. The appearance of one of his goon squad here to
> flame me very quickly after my first post here strongly suggests it,
> and I saw his name in the other recent clojure thread in cll, which
> clinches it.

Wrexsoul, I saw that whole thread on the Clojure group for at least
two days, so I don't think you were censored. If it's not there now,
it is possible it was removed because it was ugly and distracting. I
don't speak for the group, so this is just speculation.

I know you caught some personal insults (for which you also received
apologies), but I recall you also had people who made efforts to get
to the bottom of your question and discuss it reasonably. Your flames
made it difficult for others to follow the thread and extract the
valuable parts.

Since you seem wounded and angry, I would just like to tell you
exactly what was objectionable about your original post. Instead of
simply writing that you couldn't find something, or simply asking
where you might find something, you expressed amazement that something
quite fundamental was missing from the language or docs. You then
posted some code. When you loudly (in writing) express something as a
serious deficiency on someone else's part (incorrectly, as it turned
out), then post code (unnecessary, as it turned out), you should
expect a reply that focuses more on your tone and your incorrectness
than on your "question".

Since writing may not correctly convey your actual emotion, you might
avoid expressions of amazement at someone else's perceived
shortcomings and state simply that you needed X, didn't find it, so
here's an idea about how to do X. Based on my experience on the
Clojure group, you would then receive a very friendly pointer to the
code or doc that explains X.

You may also contribute bug reports, code patches, and documentation
through established channels.

I hope you don't cling to your sense of grievance, and instead keep
working with and contributing to Clojure.

Regards,
Chris

On Jun 19, 4:46 am, Jon Harrop <j> wrote:
> Wrexsoul wrote:
> > The following nonabusive post was attempted three times, at widely
> > separated intervals...
>
> I am on the Clojure list and received several repeated near-identical posts
> from you, none of which were constructive.

I don't agree that my defending myself from a false accusation of non-
thoroughness is not constructive, or that raising the issue of
documentation quality is not constructive.

> If you keep reposting the same thing for no apparent reason then,
> of course, you can expect to be silenced.

No. Only if I post off-charter, which I did not.

> In this case, you asked a very basic question

I didn't ask any question at all, actually.

> Frankly, I'd blame everyone involved including yourself. If you have other
> such very simple and generic questions you may find it more productive to
> ask them either in c.l.lisp or c.l.functional. People are generally much
> more tolerant of abuse on usenet than on mailing lists.

I have not been a source of abuse.

> Out of curiousity, in what functional language is fold called "accum"?

The previous ones I'd used called it "fold". I was thinking at the
time, though, specifically of accumulating sums and products over
seqs.

On Jun 19, 10:08 am, revoltingdevelopment
<christopherjayjo> wrote:

....MASSIVE trim...

> Wrexsoul, I saw that whole thread on the Clojure group for at least
> two days, so I don't think you were censored.

The evidence says otherwise.

> If it's not there now, it is possible it was removed because it was
> ugly and distracting.

That would constitute censorship. "Ugly and distracting" is not "spam"
or "off-topic".

> I know you caught some personal insults (for which you also received
> apologies)

I also caught some for which I have yet to receive apologies, there
and now here.

> but I recall you also had people who made efforts to get
> to the bottom of your question and discuss it reasonably.

I didn't actually have a question. Perhaps this is part of the
problem. For some inexplicable reason people seem to think I'd asked a
question (and a stupid one) when I had not.

> Your flames made it difficult for others to follow the thread

MY flames?! I was reasonable, and reasonably polite, throughout, and
am trying to remain that way now.

> Since you seem wounded and angry, I would just like to tell you
> exactly what was objectionable about your original post.

Nothing was objectionable about my original post.

> Instead of simply writing that you couldn't find something, or simply
> asking where you might find something, you expressed amazement that
> something quite fundamental was missing from the language or docs.

I had just spent 30 minutes searching the docs and reading near every
single occurrence of the three-character-substring "seq". There were a
lot of occurrences. I hadn't found what I was looking for. The a
priori odds were very high that it therefore wasn't there.

As I believe I have already mentioned (and the key point that everyone
keeps ignoring, probably intentionally), the only more thorough search
I could possibly have performed was to read the entire 200KB 60-page
API document from cover to cover.

If that is what you believe I should have done, then we're never going
to agree or be able to discuss this productively.

> When you loudly (in writing) express something as a serious deficiency
> on someone else's part

The only loud expressions of serious deficiencies on any person's part
were aimed AT me. Reread the thread if you are misremembering it.

I mentioned that I found it shocking that a particular piece of
functionality was apparently still not implemented yet. That's the
closest I came to expressing a serious deficiency in anything, and the
target in that case was clojure.core, not a person.

Subsequently I may have intimated that there might be deficiencies in
some peoples' manners, but at that point, not without plenty of a)
provocation and b) evidence, with a lot of overlap between those two
categories.

> you should expect a reply that focuses more on your tone and your
> incorrectness than on your "question".

I had no tone, no "incorrectness", and no question, as I believe I've
explained previously.

Since apparently it needs explaining AGAIN:

1. Tone. I posted ASCII. ASCII has no tone, unlike audible voice. Any
tone I'm being attacked for is therefore a figment of the
attacker's imagination. I can't accept responsibility for the
sounds of the voices other people imagine when they read text I
wrote. It's entirely out of my control. Only the sequence of
the ASCII characters is in my control.
2. Correctness. I did a search that should be above reproach as
far as doc-searching-thoroughness is concerned, and therefore
believe I acted correctly, whether you agree that I did or not.
3. Question. I did not post a question. I posted a remark and then
some code, with a good faith constructive intent. That many
people apparently can't see that does not reflect on me in any
way; it does, however, reflect on them.

> Since writing may not correctly convey your actual emotion, you might
> avoid expressions of amazement at someone else's perceived
> shortcomings

I never expressed any amazement at any person's shortcomings,
perceived or actual, until I was already under attack. At that time, I
did perhaps express some amazement at how RUDE some people were being,
and with no provocation, but you can't argue that they were rude
BECAUSE of that; the real cause must have PRECEDED, rather than
followed, the effect.

> and state simply that you needed X, didn't find it, so
> here's an idea about how to do X.

That is in fact what I did, only going beyond "an idea" to include an
actual working implementation. An admirable act, for which the
response I got was diametrically opposite what would have been
appropriate.

> Based on my experience on the Clojure group, you would then receive
> a very friendly pointer to the code or doc that explains X.

"Very friendly" and "Clojure group" do not, in my experience, belong
together in a sentence, unless joined with the word "not" somewhere in
between.

> I hope you don't cling to your sense of grievance, and instead keep
> working with and contributing to Clojure.

That choice has been taken from me, since clearly I've been in some
manner banned from posting to that group.

Working with: I may well continue to use it. Contributing to: it's
become quite clear, from this and previous threads, that my
contributions are not wanted, so I shall keep any further would-be
contributions to myself. That wouldn't be my first choice (and
demonstrably wasn't), but since it's clearly what the group's manager
wants, and the group's manager clearly exerts dictatorial authority,
sadly that's the way it'll have to be.

As for my sense of grievance, it might go away on its own some time
after people quit flaming me for my purportedly having smeared some
unnamed person in my first "accum" post (I had not) or purportedly not
having bothered to search the docs (I had done so, with the described
thoroughness).

I don't feel it unjustified. If a pretty thorough search of the docs
fails to turn something up that is in there, then there's a problem
with the docs. If it's not in there, but should be, then there's a
problem with the API.

Instead of letting it be about improving the docs and/or API, though,
several people chose to instead make it be about a person (me) and
that person's supposed shortcomings. That's where things went wrong.
Not with any action of mine. The really disappointing thing is that
the creator of Clojure was one of those people. As near as I can tell,
he took a remark evidencing that either the API or the documentation
was still missing something personally, when it wasn't about him, and
leaped to flaming the guy that noticed the problem, thereby making it
personal. I expect better from a software project's major developers.
You don't get far in the software-development world if you take every
bug report, omission report/feature request, or similar event
personally. Yet several people apparently did take an omission report
personally, whereas you can see that the only remarks that I have
taken personally were ones that clearly were personal attacks. When
people suggested changes to some of the code I'd posted, I didn't take
that personally.

I tried to not only be constructive and act in good faith, but to set
a good example. This whole incident goes to show, though, that no good
deed goes unpunished.

On Jun 18, 6:01 pm, Wrexsoul <d2387> wrote:
> On Jun 18, 5:25 pm, ACL <anonymousclis> wrote:
>> It wasn't a Usenet post. It was a Google Groups post, which Google's
> server explicitly said was "successful", and traffic in the group was
> otherwise normal for that period.
>
> If you post to a webboard (not usenet) and your posts, and ONLY your
> posts, fail to show up, you don't suspect an outage. Particularly not
> if you retry after six hours, then again after another twelve, with
> consistent results.
>

I suspect a network outage on my ISP's end.

Generally I also don't suspect a dictatorial conspiracy when my posts
were actually reasonable.

:-)
>>
>
> Did you read my post? (I have kept the relevant parts quoted above.)

Are you accusing me of not being thorough? You expect me to read the /
entire/ post? that's ridiculous.

> I said I did look at that page, but skipped parts that didn't seem
> relevant. And then I did an even MORE diligent search: one of the
> entire documentation for everything that operated on sequences. That
> took about half an hour. That's clearly at least as thorough as the
> maximum reasonable amount of thoroughness to expect from someone
> before concluding that functionality is absent.
>

So you did or didn't find reduce? Another thing I do when search
documentation is I look for synonyms, because, you know, they're
synonymous. For example had you gone to wikipedia and looked up 'fold'
probably would have found that 'reduce' is a synonym.

Aside from that, when i'm learning a new programming language, I
generally do read through the entire documentation (at least) one time
(and a few tutorials). Saves me trouble of re-inventing the wheel. But
perhaps I'm a total nerd.

> > > I reiterate: no reasonable person should consider the above in any way
> > > abusive, yet it is true beyond a reasonable doubt that I was forcibly
> > > prevented from posting it there, in response to a false accusation of
> > > lacking thoroughness. A personal attack was mooted publicly and public
> > > right of reply denied to its target.
>
> > I don't see how telling you that you lacked thoroughness is worthy of
> > such a long post. You did, it appears, lack thoroughness.
>
> I did not.
>

You didn't find a documented function that has a reasonable name with
exactly the same functionality as you wanted.

>> If that is so, then it still indicates poor behavior on Rich's part:
> he raised the topic and did not censor his own post. Two other people
> posted blatant personal attacks, ruder than Rich's, for which he
> rebuked them, but he did not censor their posts. I posted a calm
> rebuttal on the same topic, far more civil than those other two and at
> least as civil as Rich's, and he does censor it. That's quite the
> double standard.
>

Possibly, but he is a moderator (there is an inherent double
standard), and telling you that you weren't thorough is completely
different from arguing about whether you were thorough.

> (I note that you are no longer claiming the post disappearances were
> "network outages" and are now more or less admitting that they were in
> fact acts of censorship.)
>

I am operating under your assumptions. Even under your assumptions
his deletion of your post is not unreasonable that he deleted it...

> Furthermore, my post described aspects of the clojure docs. I think
> that places it squarely on topic. My OTHER post was very clearly on
> topic and non-abusive.
>
> Face it -- my posts were not deleted for being off-topic. They were
> deleted because Rich did not personally agree with the opinions
> expressed in them. In other words, this was not order-keeping
> censorship; it was political-speech-muzzling censorship, the worst
> kind.
>
Was it on topic or was it political?

At very least your assertion that Rich's deletion of this post was
malicious is conjecture. I suspect he was trying to avoid a thread
like this one on the clojure google group.

> > Seems reasonable enough to me.
>
> I disagree.
>

Well you aren't exactly an unbiased party in the matter.

> > > Likewise, if this discussion would be better conducted elsewhere than
> > > c.l.l., crosspost and set followups as appropriate, though since
> > > clojure is a Lisp, and since the clojure Google Group is obviously not
> > > an option, I don't feel this post is especially mistargeted.
>
> > No, you can be as much of an idiot as you want on c.l.l., no
> > moderators here.
>
> I have no interest in being an idiot. I do have an interest in
> justice, and in warning the public about the chilly reception people
> receive in a particular Google Group.
>

There is no justice on the Internet(s).
:-)

> > > Thank you for your time and attention.
>
> > Good luck with your personal crusade against Rich Hickey!
>
> I have no such personal crusade. I posted merely to thwart, to the
> extent possible, the censorship and to warn a potentially unsuspecting
> public.
>

OK, I'm going to apologise for this. It was kind of meant to be funny
but didn't really come off as such.

> > I hope it goes really poorly so he can write a lot of code.
>
> Perhaps you'd also be satisfied if he allocated that fraction of his
> time, apparently considerably in excess of zero, currently budgeted
> for slamming people unreasonably and for post-censoring to code-
> writing instead?
>

Yes, that was the point. :-)

> I know I would.
>
> Failing that, perhaps he cares to face me like a man and reply
> directly to my latest "challenge to his authority", instead of sending
> one of his flunkies to do the dirty work for him?
>

Wait? who is the flunky? me? I have no affiliation with Rich Hickey,
nor am I his lackey. I don't even use Clojure.

> Or maybe he can *really* man up, and apologize for the whole affair.
>
> It still astonishes me that what seems to have been an honest
> misunderstanding has blown up into this, with successive escalations
> by Rich and what's beginning to look like an actual honest-to-God goon
> squad.
>

It takes two to escalate an escalation.

[..]
> supposedly not searching the documents hard enough.
>
> Unbelieving, I reply, again calmly and rationally, to explain exactly
> how thorough my search actually was and to note that I'd noticed a
> general undercurrent of hostility there from the moment I'd arrived,
> one for which there was no obvious explanation.
>
> The result was basically just a reiteration of the same accusation of
> lacking thoroughness.
>

I don't understand how one can be so sensitive about being told that
he lacks thoroughness. That sort of level of sensitivity is generally
an indicator of trolling. Or at least, idk, an unproductive level of
sensitivity.

> I respond pointing out that the only possible more-thorough search I
> could have performed would have been to *read* the *entire* api page
> from top to bottom rather than grepping it. (It is 60 pages long, at
> 50 lines per page, and weighs in at approximately 200KB.)
>
> He deletes the response.
>
> Repeat a few times, and then here we are.
>
> Point to one single action of mine in the above sequence that wasn't,
> if anything, better than how you would have reacted had the same thing
> happened to you.
>

Deleting the response to quell further discussion of the topic seems
reasonable. It at least would have saved you discussion of the ways in
which you lack thoroughness. Now I'm sure you won't be satisified
until we have detailed every possible way in which you were not
thorough. :-P

> Point to one single action of Rich's, other than rebuking the two
> goons that one time, that seems reasonable under the circumstances.
>
> Or better yet, don't bother replying and let Rich come here and
> explain himself, maybe even apologize if he's man enough. I know he
> watches this group. The appearance of one of his goon squad here to
> flame me very quickly after my first post here strongly suggests it,
> and I saw his name in the other recent clojure thread in cll, which
> clinches it.

I am not in Rich Hickeys goon.
I can't even get clojure installed properly.
:-P

The persecution act does not make you more credible. :-)

Anyway, have a good one.

On Jun 19, 6:36 pm, ACL <anonymousclis> wrote:
> On Jun 18, 6:01 pm, Wrexsoul <d2387> wrote:
> > If you post to a webboard (not usenet) and your posts, and ONLY your
> > posts, fail to show up, you don't suspect an outage. Particularly not
> > if you retry after six hours, then again after another twelve, with
> > consistent results.
>
> I suspect a network outage on my ISP's end.

A network outage at my end would have caused a timeout error or
similar problem when I hit "send", and would have prevented a "posted
successfully" response from Google's server. If the latter message
appears, which it did, the message made it to Google's servers. At
that point, in fact, no *network* outage can wreck things, since it's
actually *arrived*; a post to a Google Group (not usenet group)
"lives" on those same Google servers. An internal fault in the server
could cause a failure at that point, but would affect everyone posting
to that Google Group, because (again unlike a usenet group) that
server is the sole repository of the posts to that group.

> Generally I also don't suspect a dictatorial conspiracy when my posts
> were actually reasonable.

Neither do I, unless enough evidence mounts. I made multiple attempts,
while observing normal traffic to the group from its other users, over
the space of 18 hours, before concluding that my posts were being
singled out for differential treatment.

>>
> Are you accusing me  of not being thorough? You expect me to read the /
> entire/ post? that's ridiculous.

I read yours. Mine was only five or so pages long, not some ludicrous
rantfest like you sometimes see. Nothing ridiculous about expecting
you to at least have skimmed it, and read particularly relevant
passages, including the bit where I described just how thoroughly I
had searched.

> > I said I did look at that page, but skipped parts that didn't seem
> > relevant. And then I did an even MORE diligent search: one of the
> > entire documentation for everything that operated on sequences. That
> > took about half an hour. That's clearly at least as thorough as the
> > maximum reasonable amount of thoroughness to expect from someone
> > before concluding that functionality is absent.
>
> So you did or didn't find reduce?

Didn't.

> Another thing I do when search documentation is I look for synonyms,
> because, you know, they're synonymous.

The synonyms I knew of were "accumulate" and "fold".

My exact procedure was:
* Searched API page for "accum" and "fold"
* Went to "sequences" page, "using a sequence" section, ignored
things like another sequence/collection from a seq or boolean from
a seq and didn't see anything plausible looking elsewhere.
* Went back to API page and read near every single occurrence of
"seq" that proved to be either "sequence" or just "seq"
(there were a few occurrences of "subsequent" that I judged to be
irrelevant to the sequence operations).

And then I implemented the apparently-missing functionality myself and
tested it to make sure it worked, rather that bother the forum to ask.

When I did post to the forum, it was to provide what I had not been
able to find already there; that is, to aid others rather than to
place demands upon others.

Look at the thanks I got.

> For example had you gone to wikipedia and looked up 'fold'

I wasn't searching wikipedia. I was searching the clojure API docs.

> Aside from that, when i'm learning a new programming language, I
> generally do read through the entire documentation (at least) one time

The basic documentation. Not the API documentation. Imagine if the
latter was the expectation. It would be years between downloading a
JDK and writing any code in Java, since there are megs and megs of API
documentation in that particular case.

Regardless, maybe you would have read 200K of documentation but I
don't think I should have to go that far, and I didn't go that far. I
stand by that choice. Whereas you are free to make another, I believe
I was still thorough enough to NOT deserve flamage from you or anybody
else for making the choice I made.

> (and a few tutorials). Saves me trouble of re-inventing the wheel. But
> perhaps I'm a total nerd.

Tempting, ever so tempting. :)

> > > > I reiterate: no reasonable person should consider the above in any way
> > > > abusive, yet it is true beyond a reasonable doubt that I was forcibly
> > > > prevented from posting it there, in response to a false accusation of
> > > > lacking thoroughness. A personal attack was mooted publicly and public
> > > > right of reply denied to its target.
>
> > > I don't see how telling you that you lacked thoroughness is worthy of
> > > such a long post. You did, it appears, lack thoroughness.
>
> > I did not.
>
> You didn't find a documented function that has a reasonable name with
> exactly the same functionality as you wanted.

But not for lack of thoroughness. It seems that for some reason the
documentation of this function completely fails to mention "seq"
anywhere in it. This is a problem. The primary interface most people
will have to the documentation is search, NOT reading the whole thing
from start to finish like it was a novel. Whether you agree that's how
it SHOULD be or not, that's how it IS, and it is therefore a bug if a
particular bit of documentation is written in such a manner as to be
missed by a likely relevant search.

>>
> Possibly, but he is a moderator (there is an inherent double
> standard)

There is not an inherent double standard. He should play by the same
rules as everyone else, even if he happens to be the one also
enforcing them. He blatantly did NOT play by the same rules as
everyone else.

The concept is called "rule of law" and there's a reason why almost
all of the more socially and economically advanced nations have it as
a guiding principle.

> and telling you that you weren't thorough is completely
> different from arguing about whether you were thorough.

That doesn't make sense.

Regardless, I feel it is the right of every person to argue before the
same audience against any personal attack directed at them. There's a
reason why almost all of the more socially and economically advanced
nations have a right of a defendant to face their accusers and the
evidence against them, and to argue in their own defense, or have
their counsel do so, before the jury.

A "trial" in which someone is accused, found guilty, and sentenced
without the opportunity to present any contrary argument or challenge
the prosecution on matters of procedure or burden-of-proof is a farce,
a kangaroo court, and not a real one.

The evidence indicates that I was accused, found guilty, and sentenced
to muzzling in that Google Group without the opportunity to defend
myself; and, furthermore, wrongly convicted.

I SEARCHED THE WHOLE OF THE API DOCS FOR "SEQ". THAT OUGHT TO BE
THOROUGH ENOUGH TO SATISFY ANY REASONABLE PERSON. OR COURT.

> > (I note that you are no longer claiming the post disappearances were
> > "network outages" and are now more or less admitting that they were in
> > fact acts of censorship.)
>
> I am operating under your assumptions. Even  under your assumptions
> his deletion of your post is not unreasonable that he deleted it...

It is unreasonable for two reasons:

1. Since it was partly about the Clojure docs, it was not off-topic,
and by no stretch of the imagination was it spam or otherwise
abusive.
2. Under any conceivable rule, based solely on content, under which
it would be classified as abusive/spam/otherwise objectionable,
the post by Rich Hickey to which it was a response would be
classified identically, yet the latter was not treated the same.
Therefore, the rule actually employed to determine what to
delete involved other factors, perhaps authorship, that are
irrelevant to the question of whether content is acceptable or
not. In other words, either I was singled out for special
bad treatment (unreasonable!) or Rich elevates himself to
special status (a double standard!).

> > Furthermore, my post described aspects of the clojure docs. I think
> > that places it squarely on topic. My OTHER post was very clearly on
> > topic and non-abusive.
>
> > Face it -- my posts were not deleted for being off-topic. They were
> > deleted because Rich did not personally agree with the opinions
> > expressed in them. In other words, this was not order-keeping
> > censorship; it was political-speech-muzzling censorship, the worst
> > kind.
>
> Was it on topic or was it political?

It was both.

> At very least your assertion that Rich's deletion of this post was
> malicious is conjecture.

So far, all the evidence points to it having been intentionally
deleted. Since it was not, by any objective standard, objectionable,
any such deletion was malicious.

Furthermore, all we have so far from Rich himself on the topic is a
guilty silence. Would not an innocent man who reads this group (and he
does read it, and occasionally posts to it, and would surely pay
attention to a thread titled "Clojure") have jumped in to say "I
didn't do anything, it must have been some technical problem!"???

> I suspect he was trying to avoid a thread like this one on the clojure
> google group.

He could have avoided that very easily, either by a) not attacking me
after his two posts rebuking the other two for posting personal
attacks, or b) attacking me, allowing my post defending myself to
stand, and not posting any further attacks.

He didn't choose to do either. Instead, he attacked me, when I
defended myself he attacked me again, and when I defended myself again
he muzzled me. Hardly an honorable way to "win" an argument. In fact,
I call it cheating, not winning.

> > > Seems reasonable enough to me.
>
> > I disagree.
>
> Well you aren't exactly an unbiased party in the matter.

On the contrary, I'm quite capable of being dispassionate about such
things. I pointed out objective facts, such as that the post was
(partly) about Clojure's documentation, to support a contention that
it was not off-topic.

Furthermore, need I remind you that a far more unconstructive personal
attack was allowed to stand undeleted:

[url down]

I quote it below, because, as incriminating evidence, it might be
subjected to deletion after this post of mine goes to the presses:

MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: by 10.100.8.17 with SMTP id 17mr575817anh.18.1245214651024;
Tue, 16
Jun 2009 21:57:31 -0700 (PDT)
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:57:30 -0700 (PDT)
In-Reply-To: <A29246FA-B6F0-4A59-9A7C-9D1A387F0744>
X-IP: 76.99.157.51
References: <7d73ddee-2f7d-4020-bdc6-
e1bb09271006>
<A29246FA-B6F0-4A59-9A7C-9D1A387F0744>
User-Agent: G2/1.0
X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_7; en-
us)
AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/530.17,gzip
(gfe),gzip(gfe)
Message-ID: <bd454cb0-1f47-4ee6-bd68-
c6c47391f059>
Subject: Re: accum
From: Sean Devlin <francoisdev>
To: Clojure <clojure>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Daniel, don't feed the WrexTroll

On Jun 17, 12:44=A0am, Daniel Lyons <fus> wrote:
[..]
>>
> Oh? What about compared to this:
>
> (use 'clojure.contrib.seq-utils)
>
> (def *tris* (reductions + (iterate inc 1)))
>
> =97


The only original line of body text was:

"Daniel, don't feed the WrexTroll"

If my post deserved to be deleted on the objective merits of its
content, than that one surely did, yet as of today, 20 June 2009, it
has been allowed to stand for four days. (You can Google it if you
don't believe me.) My posts that were deleted were deleted within
seconds; indeed, so quickly that I never saw them appear, even
briefly.

I think this is sufficient proof of a double standard in what posts
get deleted, and also that it is not merely that Rich allows certain
posts by himself to stand that he wouldn't allow from others, but that
either a special privilege extends beyond Rich to a clique of several
people that have "licenses to be boorish" or similarly, or else that
the double standard was not in favor of anyone, but rather was
*against* someone -- me.

> > > > Likewise, if this discussion would be better conducted elsewhere than
> > > > c.l.l., crosspost and set followups as appropriate, though since
> > > > clojure is a Lisp, and since the clojure Google Group is obviously not
> > > > an option, I don't feel this post is especially mistargeted.
>
> > > No, you can be as much of an idiot as you want on c.l.l., no
> > > moderators here.
>
> > I have no interest in being an idiot. I do have an interest in
> > justice, and in warning the public about the chilly reception people
> > receive in a particular Google Group.
>
> There is no justice on the Internet(s).
> :-)

That is a lament, not a justification or even an excuse for what has
happened.

> > > > Thank you for your time and attention.
>
> > > Good luck with your personal crusade against Rich Hickey!
>
> > I have no such personal crusade. I posted merely to thwart, to the
> > extent possible, the censorship and to warn a potentially unsuspecting
> > public.
>
> OK, I'm going to apologise for this. It was kind of meant to be funny
> but didn't really come off as such.

Apology accepted.

> > > I hope it goes really poorly so he can write a lot of code.
>
> > Perhaps you'd also be satisfied if he allocated that fraction of his
> > time, apparently considerably in excess of zero, currently budgeted
> > for slamming people unreasonably and for post-censoring to code-
> > writing instead?
>
> Yes, that was the point. :-)

No "crusade" of mine forced him to allocate time to either personal
attacks or post deleting. He could have simply ignored me, yet he
chose not to. He could have chosen to respond like an adult to what I
wrote, realizing that he was wrong in his hasty judgment of me and
maybe apologizing for this, but he chose not to do that, either. He
also could have chosen not to take the initial post personally.

Of course, it's not too late for him to make the choice to realize his
error and adjust his future behavior, and maybe even to apologize, but
after several days of silence from him on the topic, I don't expect
the latter, and don't hold out too much hope for the former, either.

> > Failing that, perhaps he cares to face me like a man and reply
> > directly to my latest "challenge to his authority", instead of sending
> > one of his flunkies to do the dirty work for him?
>
> Wait? who is the flunky? me? I have no affiliation with Rich Hickey,
> nor am I his lackey. I don't even use Clojure.

That's odd. As soon as a post appeared in here that was even mildly
critical of Rich, you pounced on it, sparing no time to hit it within
a few hours of its being posted. That to me suggests that either Rich
sent you as his representative, or else you voluntarily leap to his
defense whenever he is challenged (and even when it may not be
appropriate, because you'd find yourself occupying the moral low
ground).

That usually indicates some kind of flunky or hanger-on in a cult of
personality. Believe me, I've seen lots of that sort of thing on the
'net. Usually, the people with the most defenders/groupies have tended
to be particularly big assholes, too, which is funny since you'd think
nice guys would get the groupies instead. (Same thing with women --
with most, it's the size that counts. Size of a guy's bank account,
car, and ego, that is.)

> > Or maybe he can *really* man up, and apologize for the whole affair.
>
> > It still astonishes me that what seems to have been an honest
> > misunderstanding has blown up into this, with successive escalations
> > by Rich and what's beginning to look like an actual honest-to-God goon
> > squad.
>
> It takes two to escalate an escalation.

I never did escalate anything. In fact, I tried to de-escalate things
by remaining calm and polite in my responses, whatever the
provocation.

Anyway, it really doesn't take two. Imagine China invaded the US, and
the US did nothing but fight the invaders within its own borders,
without launching any retaliation against China. Then China nuked New
York and the US continued to only fight within its own borders.
Clearly there's a) a fight and b) escalation going on here, and
equally clearly, it's pretty much unilateral; China is the only
aggressor in this hypothetical situation.

A situation which, aside from its scale, is entirely analogous to the
one under discussion here.

>>
>>
>>
>
> I don't understand how one can be so sensitive about being told that
> he lacks thoroughness.

I wouldn't have been, had the accusation not been in error. Truth be
told, I was *incensed*; I'd spent over 30 minutes, all told, grepping
and skimming documentation before giving up on finding the feature in
there, and then I get told "Being
able to read is one of the most basic, useful skills in programming.
Especially if you want to be pompous without being an ass.", called a
troll, and told I wasn't thorough *enough*???

Name one person you know that would have responded as calmly as I did,
rather than flying off the handle, under similar circumstances.

Just one!

>>
>
> Deleting the response to quell further discussion of the topic seems
> reasonable.

NO, IT DOESN'T.

> It at least would have saved you discussion of the ways in
> which you lack thoroughness.

What, all zero of them? HOW many TIMES will I have to REPEAT the
detailed description of my very thorough search before people start
believing that I actually performed a very thorough search?

Note that the current documentation for "reduce" says: (quoting in
case the web site ever changes)

(reduce f coll)
(reduce f val coll)
f should be a function of 2 arguments. If val is not supplied, returns
the result of applying f to the first 2 items in coll, then applying f
to that result and the 3rd item, etc. If coll contains no items, f
must accept no arguments as well, and reduce returns the result of
calling f with no arguments. If coll has only 1 item, it is returned
and f is not called. If val is supplied, returns the result of
applying f to val and the first item in coll, then applying f to that
result and the 2nd item, etc. If coll contains no items, returns val
and f is not called.

Note the absence of "seq" anywhere in there, surprisingly for a
sequence-oriented function. It's probably the only function not
specialized for vectors, maps, or sets for which a search for "seq"
draws a blank.

It's pure accident. Not my fault that my search didn't find it. Not
anyone else's fault either, though now that it's been noticed,
rewording the text to mention "seq" somewhere might be a good idea.

Perhaps you think I should have searched for "coll" instead, or known
the name "reduce". But hindsight is always 20/20. I was thinking in
terms of sequences, and in terms of integer, rather than boolean or
collection, results, at the time. So sue me.

> Now I'm sure you won't be satisified until we have detailed every
> possible way in which you were not thorough. :-P

Since there were zero (short of searching for every synonym I could
think up and/or reading the whole api page from top to bottom over a
period of several full hours), we've already (vacuously) done so.

> > Point to one single action of Rich's, other than rebuking the two
> > goons that one time, that seems reasonable under the circumstances.
>
> > Or better yet, don't bother replying and let Rich come here and
> > explain himself, maybe even apologize if he's man enough. I know he
> > watches this group. The appearance of one of his goon squad here to
> > flame me very quickly after my first post here strongly suggests it,
> > and I saw his name in the other recent clojure thread in cll, which
> > clinches it.
>
> I am not in Rich Hickeys goon.

Fine. Regardless, I don't think you've done a very good job of
defending him. The closest you've come is to claim deleting my post
was "reasonable", have that claim solidly debunked, and then merely
reiterate it, and to suggest that it's perfectly OK for him to apply a
double standard(!). After that latter, if I were Rich and you were my
goon you'd be fired and another goon found to replace you. :)

> I can't even get clojure installed properly.
> :-P

Install NetBeans 6.5.1 (last I checked it won't work properly with
6.7) and then install enclojure and you'll have clojure 1.0 hitch
along for the ride. As an extra added bonus feature, you'll even be
able to develop in it using a 100% emacs free, zero added sodium
development environment that supports developing your code and testing
it as you go in a REPL. (The REPL even runs in a separate JVM from NB,
so screwing it up in some way, such as executing an infinite loop from
it, won't hang NB.)

> The persecution act does not make you more credible. :-)

Are you calling me a liar?

I have provided some evidence to support my claims. I have yet to see
any evidence posted that supports your side.

I think the survival of the above-cited "WrexTroll" post long after
the deletions of my previously-cited much-more-topical-and-
constructive ones is pretty damning. You will have to try very hard to
come up with any defense that could plausibly succeed in the face of
that bit of evidence favoring my interpretations and judgments.

Wrexsoul <d2387305> writes:

> [ 641 lines snipped ]

Wow!

On Jun 20, 12:33 am, Wrexsoul <d2387> wrote:
> On Jun 19, 6:36 pm, ACL <anonymousclis> wrote:
>>
> A network outage at my end would have caused a timeout error or
> similar problem when I hit "send", and would have prevented a "posted
> successfully" response from Google's server. If the latter message
> appears, which it did, the message made it to Google's servers. At
> that point, in fact, no *network* outage can wreck things, since it's
> actually *arrived*; a post to a Google Group (not usenet group)
> "lives" on those same Google servers. An internal fault in the server
> could cause a failure at that point, but would affect everyone posting
> to that Google Group, because (again unlike a usenet group) that
> server is the sole repository of the posts to that group.
>
Yeah that's true.

> > Generally I also don't suspect a dictatorial conspiracy when my posts
> > were actually reasonable.
>
> Neither do I, unless enough evidence mounts. I made multiple attempts,
> while observing normal traffic to the group from its other users, over
> the space of 18 hours, before concluding that my posts were being
> singled out for differential treatment.
>
Ah, that's a bit more clear cut then.

>>
>
> I read yours. Mine was only five or so pages long, not some ludicrous
> rantfest like you sometimes see. Nothing ridiculous about expecting
> you to at least have skimmed it, and read particularly relevant
> passages, including the bit where I described just how thoroughly I
> had searched.
>

No, I did skim it, I just didn't read it thoroughly and backtrack
through the clojure google group. It was more an admission of my own
lack of thoroughness.

> > > I said I did look at that page, but skipped parts that didn't seem
> > > relevant. And then I did an even MORE diligent search: one of the
> > > entire documentation for everything that operated on sequences. That
> > > took about half an hour. That's clearly at least as thorough as the
> > > maximum reasonable amount of thoroughness to expect from someone
> > > before concluding that functionality is absent.
>
> > So you did or didn't find reduce?
>
> Didn't.
>

So maybe its an error in technique rather than thoroughness?

> > Another thing I do when search documentation is I look for synonyms,
> > because, you know, they're synonymous.
>
> The synonyms I knew of were "accumulate" and "fold".
>

Yeah, I think it might be a culture difference, I mean, in CL docs it
is called reduce.

It is interesting that reduce is in the 'create a collection' and
'create a boolean' sections, but it doesn't necessarily create a
collection or a boolean. :-)

But yeah, Wikipedia is a good source of synonyms in future cases. (had
a heck of a time figuring out that 'reduce' in erlang is called
'foldl'.) :-)

[..]
>
> When I did post to the forum, it was to provide what I had not been
> able to find already there; that is, to aid others rather than to
> place demands upon others.
>
> Look at the thanks I got.
>> I wasn't searching wikipedia. I was searching the clojure API docs.
>

You didn't find it in the api docs, so look for a synonym and try
again.

[..]
>
> But not for lack of thoroughness. It seems that for some reason the
> documentation of this function completely fails to mention "seq"
> anywhere in it. This is a problem. The primary interface most people
> will have to the documentation is search, NOT reading the whole thing
> from start to finish like it was a novel. Whether you agree that's how
> it SHOULD be or not, that's how it IS, and it is therefore a bug if a
> particular bit of documentation is written in such a manner as to be
> missed by a likely relevant search.
>

Well really, I more skim the definitions and relate them to constructs
in other languages that I already know.

>>
>
> There is not an inherent double standard. He should play by the same
> rules as everyone else, even if he happens to be the one also
> enforcing them. He blatantly did NOT play by the same rules as
> everyone else.
>

Well, he makes the rules, and being that he is human, it is hard to be
fully unbiased about such things. I mean, think of it this way, if he
had rebuked the flames and told you to be a bit more thorough next
time, you could have just left it at that (whether or not you believe
that you were not thorough).

> The concept is called "rule of law" and there's a reason why almost
> all of the more socially and economically advanced nations have it as
> a guiding principle.
>

Ideally the law is applied even-handedly, but this is rarely the
case.
(Because people are human and inherently biased).

[..]
> the prosecution on matters of procedure or burden-of-proof is a farce,
> a kangaroo court, and not a real one.
>
> The evidence indicates that I was accused, found guilty, and sentenced
> to muzzling in that Google Group without the opportunity to defend
> myself; and, furthermore, wrongly convicted.
>
> I SEARCHED THE WHOLE OF THE API DOCS FOR "SEQ". THAT OUGHT TO BE
> THOROUGH ENOUGH TO SATISFY ANY REASONABLE PERSON. OR COURT.
>

I mean, I'm sure you could start your own un-moderated clojure google
group.
But until you do, RH would be judge, jury and executioner.

Right, but the accusation on the Google group that you were not
thorough is a trivial one.

>> It is unreasonable for two reasons:
>
> 1. Since it was partly about the Clojure docs, it was not off-topic,
>    and by no stretch of the imagination was it spam or otherwise
>    abusive.
> 2. Under any conceivable rule, based solely on content, under which
>    it would be classified as abusive/spam/otherwise objectionable,
>    the post by Rich Hickey to which it was a response would be
>    classified identically, yet the latter was not treated the same.
>    Therefore, the rule actually employed to determine what to
>    delete involved other factors, perhaps authorship, that are
>    irrelevant to the question of whether content is acceptable or
>    not. In other words, either I was singled out for special
>    bad treatment (unreasonable!) or Rich elevates himself to
>    special status (a double standard!).
>

Didn't I just say there's an inherent double standard in moderator-
ship?

You post a jab at rich, he deletes it... not shocking.

> > > Furthermore, my post described aspects of the clojure docs. I think
> > > that places it squarely on topic. My OTHER post was very clearly on
> > > topic and non-abusive.
>
> > > Face it -- my posts were not deleted for being off-topic. They were
> > > deleted because Rich did not personally agree with the opinions
> > > expressed in them. In other words, this was not order-keeping
> > > censorship; it was political-speech-muzzling censorship, the worst
> > > kind.
>
> > Was it on topic or was it political?
>
> It was both.
>

Would it make the political part off topic?

> > At very least your assertion that Rich's deletion of this post was
> > malicious is conjecture.
>
> So far, all the evidence points to it having been intentionally
> deleted. Since it was not, by any objective standard, objectionable,
> any such deletion was malicious.
>

Well you have bias too.
Objectionableness isn't something that can be held to an objective
standard.
You aren't privy to his thoughts (and its not obvious that there was
premeditation plotting against you) so you can't really determine
malice.

> Furthermore, all we have so far from Rich himself on the topic is a
> guilty silence. Would not an innocent man who reads this group (and he
> does read it, and occasionally posts to it, and would surely pay
> attention to a thread titled "Clojure") have jumped in to say "I
> didn't do anything, it must have been some technical problem!"???
>

Well if he deleted your post twice, what do you care of his opinion
anyway?

> > I suspect he was trying to avoid a thread like this one on the clojure
> > google group.
>
> He could have avoided that very easily, either by a) not attacking me
> after his two posts rebuking the other two for posting personal
> attacks, or b) attacking me, allowing my post defending myself to
> stand, and not posting any further attacks.
>
> He didn't choose to do either. Instead, he attacked me, when I
> defended myself he attacked me again, and when I defended myself again
> he muzzled me. Hardly an honourable way to "win" an argument. In fact,
> I call it cheating, not winning.
>

Your thoroughness is subjective and as such a debate of it isn't
winnable.

>>
> On the contrary, I'm quite capable of being dispassionate about such
> things. I pointed out objective facts, such as that the post was
> (partly) about Clojure's documentation, to support a contention that
> it was not off-topic.
>
> Furthermore, need I remind you that a far more unconstructive personal
> attack was allowed to stand undeleted:
>
> [..]
>
> I quote it below, because, as incriminating evidence, it might be
> subjected to deletion after this post of mine goes to the presses:
>

But don't you want it deleted?

Seems like a catch-22 now...
It gets 'moderated' and he's hiding incriminating evidence, it doesn't
get moderated, he's allowing an egregiously offensive post to stay
posted.

[..]
>>
>>
> The only original line of body text was:
>
> "Daniel, don't feed the WrexTroll"
>

I mean, generally when someone accuses you of trolling;
it is a good time to re-evaluate the approach and tone that you are
taking in a conversation.

> If my post deserved to be deleted on the objective merits of its
> content, than that one surely did, yet as of today, 20 June 2009, it
> has been allowed to stand for four days. (You can Google it if you
> don't believe me.) My posts that were deleted were deleted within
> seconds; indeed, so quickly that I never saw them appear, even
> briefly.
>

Right, which would indicate some sort of failure on the part of a
computer somewhere.
(Unless he just blocked you, which I guess is possible).

[..]
> chose not to. He could have chosen to respond like an adult to what I
> wrote, realizing that he was wrong in his hasty judgment of me and
> maybe apologizing for this, but he chose not to do that, either. He
> also could have chosen not to take the initial post personally.
>
> Of course, it's not too late for him to make the choice to realize his
> error and adjust his future behavior, and maybe even to apologize, but
> after several days of silence from him on the topic, I don't expect
> the latter, and don't hold out too much hope for the former, either.
>

Yeah, maybe he can appoint one of his lackys to post censoring and
google group monitoring.

>> That's odd. As soon as a post appeared in here that was even mildly
> critical of Rich, you pounced on it, sparing no time to hit it within
> a few hours of its being posted. That to me suggests that either Rich
> sent you as his representative, or else you voluntarily leap to his
> defense whenever he is challenged (and even when it may not be
> appropriate, because you'd find yourself occupying the moral low
> ground).
>

Nah, I don't even know the guy.
Its possible I'm playing devils advocate and giving you a forum to
vent,
because I'm not sure you've thought all of the possibilities through.


> That usually indicates some kind of flunky or hanger-on in a cult of
> personality. Believe me, I've seen lots of that sort of thing on the
> 'net. Usually, the people with the most defenders/groupies have tended
> to be particularly big assholes, too, which is funny since you'd think
> nice guys would get the groupies instead. (Same thing with women --
> with most, it's the size that counts. Size of a guy's bank account,
> car, and ego, that is.)
>

Perhaps your technique is wrong?
A lot of the time it is good to try a few different things and see
what works.
This doesn't just apply to sex.

> > > Or maybe he can *really* man up, and apologize for the whole affair.
>
> > > It still astonishes me that what seems to have been an honest
> > > misunderstanding has blown up into this, with successive escalations
> > > by Rich and what's beginning to look like an actual honest-to-God goon
> > > squad.
>
> > It takes two to escalate an escalation.
>
> I never did escalate anything. In fact, I tried to de-escalate things
> by remaining calm and polite in my responses, whatever the
> provocation.
>

Well good then.

> Anyway, it really doesn't take two. Imagine China invaded the US, and
> the US did nothing but fight the invaders within its own borders,
> without launching any retaliation against China. Then China nuked New
> York and the US continued to only fight within its own borders.
> Clearly there's a) a fight and b) escalation going on here, and
> equally clearly, it's pretty much unilateral; China is the only
> aggressor in this hypothetical situation.
>

That's an armed conflict rather than an argument.
I agree that Rich nuked your 'borders' and nuked your 'capitol city',
it would be both vaguely erotic (although probably more of an 'ewwww'
sense)
and terribly unfair to you.

> A situation which, aside from its scale, is entirely analogous to the
> one under discussion here.
>

Aside from the whole armed conflict thing.
You juxtapose a situation in which you could have taken the 'high
road' and just not responded, with a situation in which the united
states would have faced annihiliation at the face of a violent
aggressor.

[..]
> there, and then I get told "Being
> able to read is one of the most basic, useful skills in programming.
> Especially if you want to be pompous without being an ass.", called a
> troll, and told I wasn't thorough *enough*???
>
> Name one person you know that would have responded as calmly as I did,
> rather than flying off the handle, under similar circumstances.
>
> Just one!
>
I can name two:

Ghandi,
Jesus.

:-)

>>
>> NO, IT DOESN'T.
>> What, all zero of them? HOW many TIMES will I have to REPEAT the
> detailed description of my very thorough search before people start
> believing that I actually performed a very thorough search?
>

Synonyms, tutorials, asking in #clojure... google search.

If you search this document:

[url down]

For fold, you find the reduce function. I believe it is linked off the
clojure site as a good tutorial, as well as being the first hit for
'foldl in clojure' on google.

I understand and appreciate the desire for self reliance, but its a
new language, and sometimes you just have to ask.

[..]
>
> It's pure accident. Not my fault that my search didn't find it. Not
> anyone else's fault either, though now that it's been noticed,
> rewording the text to mention "seq" somewhere might be a good idea.
>
> Perhaps you think I should have searched for "coll" instead, or known
> the name "reduce". But hindsight is always 20/20. I was thinking in
> terms of sequences, and in terms of integer, rather than boolean or
> collection, results, at the time. So sue me.
>

I don't debate your search was reasonable.

>
> Since there were zero (short of searching for every synonym I could
> think up and/or reading the whole api page from top to bottom over a
> period of several full hours), we've already (vacuously) done so.
>>
>
> Fine. Regardless, I don't think you've done a very good job of
> defending him. The closest you've come is to claim deleting my post
> was "reasonable", have that claim solidly debunked, and then merely
> reiterate it, and to suggest that it's perfectly OK for him to apply a
> double standard(!). After that latter, if I were Rich and you were my
> goon you'd be fired and another goon found to replace you. :)
>

Not really trying to defend him.
Probably would have been better for him to have just ignored your post
entirely.
(If he did delete it).

Its not 'OK' to apply a double standard, its reasonable.

Cops can carry around assault rifles. I can't.
Is it 'OK'? I have no idea!
Is it reasonable? maybe.

Proof I'm not a goon!

> > I can't even get clojure installed properly.
> > :-P
>
> Install NetBeans 6.5.1 (last I checked it won't work properly with
> 6.7) and then install enclojure and you'll have clojure 1.0 hitch
> along for the ride. As an extra added bonus feature, you'll even be
> able to develop in it using a 100% emacs free, zero added sodium
> development environment that supports developing your code and testing
> it as you go in a REPL. (The REPL even runs in a separate JVM from NB,
> so screwing it up in some way, such as executing an infinite loop from
> it, won't hang NB.)
>

Yeah, I think my error was trying to use emacs.
I had no problems with SBCL and emacs, but setting up clojure and
emacs with clojure-contrib and stuff nearly gave me an aneurysm.

> > The persecution act does not make you more credible. :-)
>
> Are you calling me a liar?
>

No I'm meant to say it doesn't add anything to your argument that the
documentation needs to be improved. Credible was a bad word for it.

> I have provided some evidence to support my claims. I have yet to see
> any evidence posted that supports your side.
>
> I think the survival of the above-cited "WrexTroll" post long after
> the deletions of my previously-cited much-more-topical-and-
> constructive ones is pretty damning. You will have to try very hard to
> come up with any defense that could plausibly succeed in the face of
> that bit of evidence favoring my interpretations and judgments.

When faced with such tasks I find that I generally opt to throw my
hands up in the air and do something else. :-)

Although similarly I wouldn't hold my breath for a response from the
accused if I were you.

Not really in anyone's best interests for him to.

Wrexsoul wrote:
> On Jun 19, 4:46 am, Jon Harrop <j> wrote:
>> Wrexsoul wrote:
>> > The following nonabusive post was attempted three times, at widely
>> > separated intervals...
>>
>> I am on the Clojure list and received several repeated near-identical
>> posts from you, none of which were constructive.
>
> I don't agree that my defending myself from a false accusation of non-
> thoroughness is not constructive...

If you were thorough, how did you manage to miss this:

http://clojure.org/api#toc476

On Jun 20, 2:14 am, ACL <anonymousclis> wrote:
> On Jun 20, 12:33 am, Wrexsoul <d2387@bsnownet>wrote:>OnJun19,6:36 pm,ACL<anonymo usclis> wrote:
>>
>
> No, I did skim it, I just didn't read it thoroughly and backtrack
> through the clojure google group. It was more an admission of my own
> lack of thoroughness.

OK. It seemed a bit snarky to me.

> > > > I said I did look at that page, but skipped parts that didn't seem
> > > > relevant. And then I did an even MORE diligent search: one of the
> > > > entire documentation for everything that operated on sequences. That
> > > > took about half an hour. That's clearly at least as thorough as the
> > > > maximum reasonable amount of thoroughness to expect from someone
> > > > before concluding that functionality is absent.
>
> > > So you did or didn't find reduce?
>
> > Didn't.
>
> So maybe its an error in technique rather than thoroughness?

You seem very determined to find some way to pin the blame on me. Why
can't you just accept that it was an accident stemming from the
unlikely occurrence of a seq-related function whose documentation
doesn't mention "seq"?

> > > Another thing I do when search documentation is I look for synonyms,
> > > because, you know, they're synonymous.
>
> > The synonyms I knew of were "accumulate" and "fold".
>
> Yeah, I think it might be a culture difference, I mean, in CL docs it
> is called reduce.
>
> It is interesting that reduce is in the 'create a collection' and
> 'create a boolean' sections, but it doesn't necessarily create a
> collection or a boolean. :-)

Yes, that's a second spot where I could have found it in the
documentation, had something been a bit different in the
documentation. If it had mentioned "accumulate a product or a sum, or
otherwise reduce a collection or sequence to a value" then I'd have
found it.

> But yeah, Wikipedia is a good source of synonyms in future cases.

The docs aren't on Wikipedia.

> > > For example had you gone to wikipedia and looked up 'fold'
>
> > I wasn't searching wikipedia. I was searching the clojure API docs.
>
> You didn't find it in the api docs

If I didn't find it in the api docs, I was not likely to find it at
some other website entirely.

> You didn't find it ... so look for a synonym and try again.

Your algorithm has a problem: if the sought functionality genuinely
doesn't exist (yet), it never terminates.

> > > You didn't find a documented function that has a reasonable name with
> > > exactly the same functionality as you wanted.
>
> > But not for lack of thoroughness. It seems that for some reason the
> > documentation of this function completely fails to mention "seq"
> > anywhere in it. This is a problem. The primary interface most people
> > will have to the documentation is search, NOT reading the whole thing
> > from start to finish like it was a novel. Whether you agree that's how
> > it SHOULD be or not, that's how it IS, and it is therefore a bug if a
> > particular bit of documentation is written in such a manner as to be
> > missed by a likely relevant search.
>
> Well really, I more skim the definitions and relate them to constructs
> in other languages that I already know.

Well, that's just you. Most people grep rather than skim.

> > > Possibly, but he is a moderator (there is an inherent double
> > > standard)
>
> > There is not an inherent double standard. He should play by the same
> > rules as everyone else, even if he happens to be the one also
> > enforcing them. He blatantly did NOT play by the same rules as
> > everyone else.
>
> Well, he makes the rules, and being that he is human, it is hard to be
> fully unbiased about such things.

Nonetheless, it is his responsibility to try.

> I mean, think of it this way, if he
> had rebuked the flames and told you to be a bit more thorough next
> time, you could have just left it at that (whether or not you believe
> that you were not thorough).

What, and give the impression that I didn't disagree with his
assessment of my thoroughness? I was fairly sure he hadn't bothered to
read carefully what I'd written, particularly my description of how
thoroughly I had in fact searched.

He also implied that there was some sort of bad-faith behavior on my
part, saying I'd "gotten a poor start" or similar. This was a vague
accusation of having done something wrong, persistently, and obviously
required clarification. He neglected to ever actually clarify it.

> > The concept is called "rule of law" and there's a reason why almost
> > all of the more socially and economically advanced nations have it as
> > a guiding principle.
>
> Ideally the law is applied even-handedly, but this is rarely the
> case.
> (Because people are human and inherently biased).

That's not a justification for what happened. It's barely even an
excuse. I won't accept it as one.

> > I SEARCHED THE WHOLE OF THE API DOCS FOR "SEQ". THAT OUGHT TO BE
> > THOROUGH ENOUGH TO SATISFY ANY REASONABLE PERSON. OR COURT.
>
> I mean, I'm sure you could start your own un-moderated clojure google
> group.
> But until you do, RH would be judge, jury and executioner.

Your argument could equally be used to support a lack of defendants'
rights in a real criminal court:

"I mean, I'm sure you could start your own anarchy on a desert island
somewhere. But until you do, the U.S. government would be judge, jury,
and executioner."

But in the real world, the existence of a government and its having
judges, a prison system, and the like doesn't automatically preclude
having fair trials before juries of one's peers. It depends on the
government. And we generally agree, here in the West, that a
government that does behave dictatorially is a poor government
compared to the alternative.

> Right, but the accusation on the Google group that you were not
> thorough is a trivial one.

To you.

>> Didn't I just say there's an inherent double standard in moderator-
> ship?
>
> You post a jab at rich, he deletes it... not shocking.

I did not post a jab at Rich. Read the first post of this thread. It
contains the entirety of the post that was deleted.

>>
>
> Would it make the political part off topic?

Not when it's internal politics of the group.

> > > At very least your assertion that Rich's deletion of this post was
> > > malicious is conjecture.
>
> > So far, all the evidence points to it having been intentionally
> > deleted. Since it was not, by any objective standard, objectionable,
> > any such deletion was malicious.
>
> Well you have bias too.

No, sir, I do not, or at least I'm very good at suppressing it. I
provided objective evidence to support my claims. I have yet to see
yours. All I have seen from you are arguments of two forms:
1. "You're biased!" which is a fallacy, an ad hominem argument.
2. "Rich can do whatever he likes!" Technically true, but immaterial
to whether his behavior is malicious, or he could have handled
things better.

> You aren't privy to his thoughts (and its not obvious that there was
> premeditation plotting against you) so you can't really determine
> malice.

Nonsense. Deleting a non-objectionable post is inherently a malicious
act. Furthermore, after he'd had 18 hours to cool down he promptly
deleted another attempt to repost it. That goes to premeditation.

> > Furthermore, all we have so far from Rich himself on the topic is a
> > guilty silence. Would not an innocent man who reads this group (and he
> > does read it, and occasionally posts to it, and would surely pay
> > attention to a thread titled "Clojure") have jumped in to say "I
> > didn't do anything, it must have been some technical problem!"???
>
> Well if he deleted your post twice, what do you care of his opinion
> anyway?

I care more that he be a good maintainer for clojure. That is now in
doubt, since he seems to take (some) bug reports personally, not a
quality of a good maintainer. (And we're not talking "Rich, clojure is
still missing X, you stupid doofus", which I would not be bothered to
see him take personally. We're talking closer to "It's version 1.0 but
it still seems to be missing X", with no naming of names and no
"stupid", "doofus", or similar epithets. A good software developer
shouldn't take that personally, even if the problem turns out to be in
the docs rather than the feature-set.)

>>
> Your thoroughness is subjective and as such a debate of it isn't
> winnable.

My thoroughness is not subjective. Objectively, the clock measured 30
minutes or a bit more of time during my search, and I've already
described the procedures I'd used. There is nothing whatsoever
subjective about it. I did, indeed, read near every occurrence in the
docs of "seq", for example. Had a camera been filming me and the video
ended up on YouTube, you'd be able to verify that for yourself. It is
not possible that I subjectively *feel* that I read near every
occurrence of "seq" but someone else can subjectively *feel* that I
had not done so and those would be equally valid. The hypothetical
camera footage would support one and refute one, which is a good test
of whether something is really subjective or is objective.

The only thing subjective here is not how thorough I was, but how
thorough people feel I should have been.

It's similar to temperature. It is 70 degrees. This is an objective
fact. Whether some people feel that's cool and others feel that's warm
can be subjective, but not the actual temperature. Ditto my
thoroughness.

And anyone expecting greater thoroughness than I displayed has their
subjective opinion on how thorough people should be *way* an outlier,
like someone who even finds 90 degrees to be cool weather, and should
not be making decisions for everybody, like who gets banned for being
insufficiently thorough or how warm the weather has to be before the
air conditioning is turned on in a public facility they maintain.

Therefore, *if* Rich agrees with you that even a search near every
occurrence of "seq" in the docs wasn't good enough and I should have
*read* absolutely *everything* before ever sitting down to write a
line of code (and at this point the evidence is equivocal), then he
should step down as group manager as in my opinion he isn't fit to be
doing the banning there. Whether I'd trust him to control the air
conditioning in my bank branch depends on whether he also considers 90
degrees to be "cool weather" or not. :)

>>
>>
> But don't you want it deleted?

No. I'm not very fond of censorship, even of obvious rudeness and
stupidity like that. Let it sit there embarrassing Sean Devlin, along
with the rebuke he got for posting it, and the apology he posted
subsequently. Especially since it's evidence of a deletion double-
standard.

> Seems like a catch-22 now...
> It gets 'moderated' and he's hiding incriminating evidence, it doesn't
> get moderated, he's allowing an egregiously offensive post to stay
> posted.

It gets "moderated", or not, while my own posts get reinstated: he's
seen the error of his ways and repented of his sins.

It's only a catch-22 if there is *no* way out.

> > The only original line of body text was:
>
> > "Daniel, don't feed the WrexTroll"
>
> I mean, generally when someone accuses you of trolling;
> it is a good time to re-evaluate the approach and tone that you are
> taking in a conversation.

There's that "tone" thing again! Remember, all I am posting is ASCII.
If when you read it you hear a voice in your head saying the words,
and that voice has any particular tone, that is actually *your* voice,
a figment of *your* imagination, and I can't be held responsible for
how it says whatever it says, only for the sequence of ASCII codes in
my post.

Thinking I'm a troll for this "tone" thing is, when you think about
it, exactly as silly as thinking I'm a robot after feeding the text of
one of my posts through text-to-speech software and getting a
mechanical, Stephen Hawking-esque voice. The robotic voice is the
result of the text-to-speech software, not my true voice, just as any
voice you project onto usenet posts you read is the result of some
kind of software in your brain, rather than my true voice. If that
part of your brain that summons up imaginary voices to go along with
words you read is bothering you, you won't fix that by hassling random
Usenet posters whose ASCII it read out loud to you.

Not that I know how you would fix it. Since it's akin to visualizing
or otherwise imagining, perhaps just try to imagine it differently?
Yeah, I know, sometimes easier said than done.

> > If my post deserved to be deleted on the objective merits of its
> > content, than that one surely did, yet as of today, 20 June 2009, it
> > has been allowed to stand for four days. (You can Google it if you
> > don't believe me.) My posts that were deleted were deleted within
> > seconds; indeed, so quickly that I never saw them appear, even
> > briefly.
>
> Right, which would indicate some sort of failure on the part of a
> computer somewhere.
> (Unless he just blocked you, which I guess is possible).

Which I guess is a near-certainty, given that during the period of the
"outage" ONLY MY POSTS were affected -- plenty of others got posted
normally.

> > No "crusade" of mine forced him to allocate time to either personal
> > attacks or post deleting. He could have simply ignored me, yet he
> > chose not to. He could have chosen to respond like an adult to what I
> > wrote, realizing that he was wrong in his hasty judgment of me and
> > maybe apologizing for this, but he chose not to do that, either. He
> > also could have chosen not to take the initial post personally.
>
> > Of course, it's not too late for him to make the choice to realize his
> > error and adjust his future behavior, and maybe even to apologize, but
> > after several days of silence from him on the topic, I don't expect
> > the latter, and don't hold out too much hope for the former, either.
>
> Yeah, maybe he can appoint one of his lackys to post censoring and
> google group monitoring.

A job that doesn't need doing? Well, unless the group gets the
occasional spam or genuine troll.

>>
> Nah, I don't even know the guy.
> Its possible I'm playing devils advocate and giving you a forum to
> vent,
> because I'm not sure you've thought all of the possibilities through.

As you've probably begun to realize, I'm quite thorough, even if few
seem to give me credit for it.

> > That usually indicates some kind of flunky or hanger-on in a cult of
> > personality. Believe me, I've seen lots of that sort of thing on the
> > 'net. Usually, the people with the most defenders/groupies have tended
> > to be particularly big assholes, too, which is funny since you'd think
> > nice guys would get the groupies instead. (Same thing with women --
> > with most, it's the size that counts. Size of a guy's bank account,
> > car, and ego, that is.)
>
> Perhaps your technique is wrong?
> A lot of the time it is good to try a few different things and see
> what works.

Are you suggesting I want groupies, and should try being an asshole
for a while to see if I acquire a retinue? Nah, not really interested.
Code is my passion.

> This doesn't just apply to sex.

You can't have sex with code. (Pending the invention of a bodysuit
with haptics and a USB jack, anyway.)

> > Anyway, it really doesn't take two. Imagine China invaded the US, and
> > the US did nothing but fight the invaders within its own borders,
> > without launching any retaliation against China. Then China nuked New
> > York and the US continued to only fight within its own borders.
> > Clearly there's a) a fight and b) escalation going on here, and
> > equally clearly, it's pretty much unilateral; China is the only
> > aggressor in this hypothetical situation.
>
> That's an armed conflict rather than an argument.
> I agree that Rich nuked your 'borders' and nuked your 'capitol city',
> it would be both vaguely erotic (although probably more of an 'ewwww'
> sense)
> and terribly unfair to you.

I don't swing that way, sorry.

> > A situation which, aside from its scale, is entirely analogous to the
> > one under discussion here.
>
> Aside from the whole armed conflict thing.
> You juxtapose a situation in which you could have taken the 'high
> road' and just not responded, with a situation in which the united
> states would have faced annihiliation at the face of a violent
> aggressor.

Aside from the questionable use of the word "juxtaposition", consider
the analogy to be between "Wrexsoul-in-the-clojure group" and "Rich".
"Wrexsoul-in-the-clojure-group" *has* apparently been annihilated.

>>
>
> I can name two:
>
> Ghandi,
> Jesus.
>
> :-)

Amend the above: LIVING person. One of the above is dead, and the
other is not only dead but possibly fictitious.

> > > It at least would have saved you discussion of the ways in
> > > which you lack thoroughness.
>
> > What, all zero of them? HOW many TIMES will I have to REPEAT the
> > detailed description of my very thorough search before people start
> > believing that I actually performed a very thorough search?
>
> Synonyms, tutorials, asking in #clojure... google search.

The api documentation should be self-sufficient. If it relies on users
doing other stuff, then it still has a bug and my point stands.

> Synonyms,

I tried both "fold" and "accum". I didn't know "reduce". I can't try
synonyms that never would have occurred to me.

> tutorials,

Didn't know of one.

> asking in #clojure...

If that means IRC, I think that would require me to actually install
software, and I seem to recall a) IRC software tends to have security
holes and b) IRC tends to be chock-full of losers with a love of
exploiting such holes. Though perhaps it's changed in the decade or
more since I last used it. You definitely risked a winnuke going
anywhere near IRC with a Windows computer back then, though.

> google search.

For what? The only google search to occur to me is "accum", "fold", or
failing those "seq" "site:clojure.org". Which has identical results to
the in-Firefox searches I performed, only with the need to click links
to go to each result instead of just hit F3. Ugh, yuck, no thanks.

> If you search this document:
>
> [..]
>
> For fold, you find the reduce function.

So now everyone who uses clojure is expected to search this ociweb.com
site too? Fine -- I'll accept that if the clojure.org site prominently
links to it and says "SEARCH THERE AS WELL AS HERE BEFORE ASKING
STUPID QUESTIONS OR SAYING YOU DIDN'T FIND SOMETHING". Until then, I
stand by my documented search procedure as thorough-enough-to-pass-
reasonable-standards.

> I understand and appreciate the desire for self reliance, but its a
> new language, and sometimes you just have to ask.

Yet strangely enough I didn't have to ask, because I was easily able
to implement the "missing" functionality myself.

>>
> I don't debate your search was reasonable.

Ah. Well, that settles it, then.

If only Rich could come around to the same realization.

>>
>
> Not really trying to defend him.
> Probably would have been better for him to have just ignored your post
> entirely.
>  (If he did delete it).

It definitely would have been. It would have been better still if he'd
engaged with me and allowed whatever misunderstanding was fueling the
acrimony to be cleared up. In my experience, not getting to the root
of a dispute like that results in it festering.

> Its not 'OK' to apply a double standard, its reasonable.

It's neither.

> Cops can carry around assault rifles. I can't.

Where? Here in the good ol' US of A, cops can carry around handguns.
SWAT teams even get to use shotguns loaded with beanbag rounds. In
hostage situations, they may actually have a sniper rifle or two. But
cops carrying around AKs? I don't think so, absent martial law anyway.

> Is it 'OK'? I have no idea!
> Is it reasonable? maybe.
>
> Proof I'm not a goon!

I don't know about that.

Furthermore, if Rich's muzzling people that disagree with him is to be
analogized with cops behaving differently from regular citizens, it's
closer to the Rodney King beating than having a permit to carry, IMO.

>> Yeah, I think my error was trying to use emacs.
> I had no problems with SBCL and emacs, but setting up clojure and
> emacs with clojure-contrib and stuff nearly gave me an aneurysm.

Did you try setting up NetBeans? If you really, perversely want to use
emacs, you still can; clojure will be on your classpath once the
install of enclojure is done, and then can be invoked from the command
line or wherever.

> > > The persecution act does not make you more credible. :-)
>
> > Are you calling me a liar?
>
> No I'm meant to say it doesn't add anything to your argument that the
> documentation needs to be improved. Credible was a bad word for it.

Perhaps because I'm arguing multiple things, and my arguments in favor
of any one of those things will tend to be irrelevant to the others.

> > I think the survival of the above-cited "WrexTroll" post long after
> > the deletions of my previously-cited much-more-topical-and-
> > constructive ones is pretty damning. You will have to try very hard to
> > come up with any defense that could plausibly succeed in the face of
> > that bit of evidence favoring my interpretations and judgments.
>
> When faced with such tasks I find that I generally opt to throw my
> hands up in the air and do something else. :-)

A wise choice.

> Although similarly I wouldn't hold my breath for a response from the
> accused if I were you.
>
> Not really in anyone's best interests for him to.

His own? His credibility to be a good maintainer would be improved if
he demonstrated that, while he occasionally suffered lapses in
judgment and took bug reports/similarly personally that he shouldn't
have, he was also able to recover from those lapses and, after a few
days to cool down, was able to do the right thing.

On Jun 20, 12:14 pm, Jon Harrop <j> wrote:
> Wrexsoul wrote:
> > I don't agree that my defending myself from a false accusation of non-
> > thoroughness is not constructive...
>
> If you were thorough, how did you manage to miss this:
>
>  [..]

I already explained how: it fails to mention "seq" anywhere, and
that's how it managed to be missed by my entirely-reasonable search.

With hindsight, it's easy to think of better search strategies, but
that proves nothing. Hindsight is always 20/20.